I hope it's alright for a stranger to show up and ask you a question. Are you a cop? Did you use to be a cop? I'm a cop, a Brooklyn Borough detective. I don't like procedurals because they always get it wrong. But, my wife kept at me to try one of yours, so I did and went on to read all the Marian Larch books. I never worked a Manhattan precinct, but the department politics you talk about there, you could have been talking about Brooklyn. Lady, you got it dead right. I used to work for a guy like Captain DiFalco, a liar, always playing the angles. And it worked, he's now a watch commander. Even the atmosphere is right, i don't mean atmosphere, starts with a. So I have to ask, have you ever been a cop?

No, I was never a cop; don't have what it takes to do that job. I just did the usual writer-ish thing of researching my subject. I read a lot about the structure of the NYPD and called some precinct houses with questions and had a nice long chat with the PR officer, Lt. O'Connell. Everyone was wonderfully helpful and explained things I couldn't figure out on my own (such as when Homicide is called in when someone dies in a fire and when it stays with the Arson Squad).

As to the departmental politics...well, sometimes I think all human activity is about the same thing: jockeying for position. You see it everywhere from government and big business all the way down to small groups of friends, so I knew it had to be rife in a huge police department like the NYPD. It's a common, shared conflict that I just put within the setting of police work.

And I'm sorry about "your" Captain DiFalco. Maybe he'll get his come-uppance one of these days.

Ah, but he is an ex-pilot! Trained as fighter pilot in WWII but ended up flying bombers instead. (In his autobiography, he likens Spitfires to wonderfully responsive horses. But of course! What other comparison would he choose?) After the war, he had some sort of commercial flying biz for a while, if I'm remembering correctly -- something to do with ferrying people and maybe horses to and from races, of course. Just like one of his characters.

Barbara, you sure fooled me. It was all those details that were so right, like that lazy detective Dowd who ducked out and left his partner alone onthe job, that goes on more then the public knows. Anyway, I enjoyed the stories, though I don't know what Marian sees in Holland. My wife likes him, though. I haven't read the short stories, they're harder to track down.